Laura Stack creates ink paintings and collages that are an imagined view of artificial life or the
“new natural”. Her painting process begins by envisioning a fluid, bodily, cellular, or chemical world expressing its own laws of physics. Organic forms such as fungi and microscopic life and the biological processes of lava flow and branching inspire the painting imagery. She coaxes the ink across the paper’s surface, corralling, halting, spreading, and encouraging its direction. The ink shapes then morph into tendrils or bloom and disperse. Through physical gestures and the fluidity of the ink, she aims to create a sense of pulse and movement.

Stack’s work evokes contradictions – the embodiment of the natural and synthetic, the simultaneity of flatness and depth, and the illusion of movement within a still image. There is no logical reading of these paintings. They are a mirroring of the mysterious questions that define our changing relationship with the natural world. See more of Laura’s artwork at laurastackart.com

LAURA STACK is a new artist at CIRCA GALLERY and her paintings are part of the Circa “Winter Salon” exhibit. Stack’s painting “Fluere #8” was featured in the recent Star Tribune review of the “Winter Salon”.www.startribune.com/circa-gallery

Review by Camille LeFevreTogether again, in their third joint exhibition at Rosalux Gallery, Laura Stack and Valerie Jenkins further their examinations into abstraction as a means to greater understanding of circumstance and existence. Stack studies experience on a cellular level, exploring the effects science (whether physics, medical practices, or chemical imbalances) has on the body, which she renders in forms and colors bordering on psychedelic. Jenkins, meanwhile, uses shape and line economically to distill the quotidian into expressions at once recognizable, mysterious, and profound.

Rosalux Gallery artists are showing their art at 118th Annual Open Exhibition of Society of Scottish Artists at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinborough. Check out images from the opening, photographed by John P Corrigan. See more at photos.google.com/share

Rosalux artists artwork included in SSA Show 2015-16, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinborough.

Rosalux artists artwork included in SSA Show 2015-16, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinborough.

I step into Rosalux Gallery and wish I could take a seat in the world of Shana Kaplow’s ink on paper painting, Traveler. It’s an elegant representation of the basic plastic lawn chair found on so many porches and backyard patios, yet her otherwise realistic rendering of this almost-disposable piece of furniture abruptly dissolves into rows of billowing smoke. In the top register, translucent ink swashes bleed into the pores of the paper, as if the plastic material were melted and then evaporated into a blank expanse. With no back for support and the chair’s arms dismembered, what appears at first glance to be a near photographic replica of a lawn chair morphs into something more uncanny.

In Rosalux Gallery’s August exhibition, Low Lying Area, local artists Shana Kaplow and Rebecca Krinke reimagine such simple pieces of furniture through painting, sculpture, and installation to unearth the connections between the personal and collective embedded in the familiar physical world. In Kaplow’s series of nine ink-on-paper paintings, she selects a plastic lawn chair, a mushroom-shaped stool, a basic black table, and a cotton pillow for her subjects. These common objects become far less so when translated to ink this way, granted a preternatural nobility by virtue of a rare attention and care given to the detailed execution. Kaplow’s rigorous line work and expert ink washes elevate each object, imbue it with an aura of importance exceeding its industrial, mass-produced origins.

Many of Kaplow’s artworks feature diptychs with one image floating on top of another that make for a landscape filled with both cohesion and disillusion. While many image pairings seem to mirror one another, other times they illuminate a stark contrast—between the modern and traditional, expensive and cheap, substantive and ephemeral. For instance, in Expansion of Wealth, a sleek IKEA chair lies lopsided on top of a worn Chinese worker’s stool. Reminiscent of similar re-makings of stools at Kaplow’s recent exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, this stool likewise carries a map of splintered cracks, a testament to years of use. In contrast, the unblemished manufactured materials of the chair above that worn stool references those for sale in the aisles of IKEA. Chairs, some of the most universal objects in the world, seen in this light bear markers of class, status, and culture. The drastic rupture between the overlaid paintings allows for a deeper investigation of the narratives they each carry; in a real sense, the worn stool of a worker supports the production of this attractive and profitable First-World chair. Read the full article athttp://www.mnartists.org/article/home-and-unseen-world

Curated by Jehra Patrick, the exhibition centralizes on the notion that art – and artistic pursuits – are born out of inherent risk: objects, proposals, performances, and ideas out into the word without guarantee of reception. Success is unpredictable. Outcomes are hard to calculate.